Organizing Your Craft Space – Jo Packham

Organizing Your Craft Space by Jo Packham is a gorgeous book. Mouthwatering beautiful. Every page offers encouragement that crafters who are overwhelmed by their stashes of supplies and heaps of tools can get organized to be more productive and effective in their artistic efforts. The thematic structure of the book is outstanding: an opening chapter which provides an overview of how to assess any space for use with any imaginative endeavor, and then following chapters explicitly designed for assessing your spaces in light of seven common specialties: stained glass and mosaics, rubber stamping and stenciling, scrapbooking, paper crafts, beading, yarn crafts and needlework, and quilting. There’s a lot of crossover between those crafts, and the ideas for those crafts are translatable to other arts and hobbies such as model-making.

Of course, don’t take this book as a license to go out and buy every bin, every cute box, every size and shape cubby you think might help. Do the work, the hard work, to examine your work area and your needs and plan – the old “Measure twice, cut once” is real. You’ll get time back for your most important stuff – your creations.